Conventional laser micromachining techniques for manufacturing a mold for use in forming a light guide involve forming small regions of light-extracting optical elements individually. This can require thousands of different masks to form the light-extracting elements. Due to the time required to interchange the different masks, such conventional techniques can require the manufacturing process to take several weeks to generate a mold to make a television-sized version of the light guide, for example. Conventional mechanical machining techniques are also very slow. Conventional chemical etch techniques do not provide defined light ray angle distributions and conventional density patterning techniques result in low pattern densities in which the individual light-extracting optical elements can be visible in a television-sized light guide.
An ability to create the light guides used in high-efficiency LED-based lighting and backlights quickly and inexpensively will hasten the rate at which LED-based lighting is adopted and the energy savings resulting from wide-spread use of LED-based lighting are realized.